FIU’s Green Library

Green Library’smusic collection—like the university itself—is young and growing, having been made richer by many donors. Its sound collection, consisting of over 38,000 mostly classical and jazz LP recordings and almost 23,000 classical compact discs is one the largest and most complete in the Florida university system. The library was the fortunate recipient of the WTMI radio station’s gift of its entire LP collection, which gave it an early start toward a very complete sound collection to serve the listening needs of the School of Music as well as those of the greater university. Additionally the library subscribes to Naxos Music Library, an online streaming library of almost 100,000 classical discs over and 20,000 jazz discs. The library’s Sound and Images department is also home to the Diaz-Ayala Collection of Latin American popular and jazz music.

The library’s 5th floor contains the sound recordings, scores and books comprising almost the entire whole of the music collection. Reference materials are housed there as well, such as the major music encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is a growing collection of urtext and critical edition performing scores by such publishers as Henle, Barenreiter and Breitkopf, as well as interpretive editions—many of which were gifts. A large collection of miniature scores are from Albert Bolet, brother of George Bolet, the well-known Cuban classical pianist. There is also a growing collection of the collected sets of the works major composers in modern, critical editions.

The book collection is largely English language materials and contains many biographies, autobiographies, bibliographies and critical studies of all aspects of musical history.

Housed on the library’s fifth floor, but belonging to the College of Architecture + the Arts is the Julian Kreeger Collectionof sound recordings currently being added to the library’s catalog. This is a collection of largely LP and mostly piano (but also opera and orchestral) recordings of the world famous pianists, orchestras and conductors and represents a lifetime of discriminating sound recording collecting. The Collection features many early and rare Soviet-era vinyl recordings of distinguished pianists including Emil Gilels, Svatoslav Ritcher, Vladamir Sofronitsky, Maria Grinberg, Yakov Fliere, Mark Taimanov, Maria Yudina, Lazar Berman, as well as a 1903 (78 rpm) recording by Camille Saint-Saens performing on the piano.